Brain scans may reveal most effective anti-drug messages

COLUMBUS, Ohio — What if you could look into the brains of potential drug abusers and see what messages would be most likely to persuade them to “just say no?” That’s the ultimate goal of researchers whose new study scanned the brains of people while they watched anti-drug public service announcements (PSAs). The results provided new insights into how people at risk of drug use process anti-drug messages – and which messages they find most persuasive, said Richard Huskey, co-author of the study and assistant professor of communication at The Ohio State University. “It is very difficult to ask potential drug users which anti-drug PSAs work best. They are generally very defensive and are apt to say that none of the messages is convincing,” Huskey said. “Even though they often say that none of the anti-drug messages are effective, their brains tell a different story.” Huskey conducted the study with J. Michael Mangus and René Weber, colleagues from the University of California, Santa Barbara, where he received his doctoral degree, and Benjamin Turner of Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. The study appears in the December 2017 issue of the journal Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience. For the study, 28 students at UCSB watched 32 real 30-second anti-drug PSAs while in an fMRI scanner. Half were at high risk of drug use and half were at low risk. Drug use risk was assessed with a validated self-report measure that the students had completed earlier. Later, the participants rated each PSA on… [Read full story]

Two men were injured Sunday night in Austin, Texas, in an explosion possibly caused by a bomb detonated by a trip wire, the police said. The incident marks the fourth blast in the city in March. The police have been investigating a string of deadly package bombings that killed two people and seriously injured another. It’s unclear whether Sunday night’s explosion was connected to the three others. Two men in Austin, Texas, suffered non-life-threatening injuries after a roadside explosion that may have been triggered by a trip wire on Sunday evening, the police said. The Austin Police Department said on…... [Read more]

Informatics “Mind Reading” Brain Scans Reveal Secrets of Human Vision"Mind reading" scans show that, to our brains, a sparse line drawing of a street scene is almost as recognizable as a detailed color photograph. Researchers call it mind reading. One at a time, they show a volunteer – who's resting in an MRI scanner – a series of photos of beaches, city streets, forests, highways, mountains and offices. The subject looks at the photos, but says nothing.The researchers, however, can usually tell which photo the volunteer is watching at any given moment, aided by sophisticated software that interprets the signals…... [Read more]

New research suggests that the layer of insulation coating neural wiring in the brain plays a critical role in determining intelligence. In addition, the quality of this insulation appears to be largely genetically determined, providing further support for the idea that IQ is partly inherited. The findings, which result from a detailed study of twins’ brains, hint at how ever-improving brain-imaging technology could shed light on some of our most basic characteristics. “The study answers some very fundamental questions about how the brain expresses intelligence,” says Philip Shaw, a child psychiatrist at the National Institute of Mental Health, in Bethesda,…... [Read more]

On the face of it, math has a whole lot to do with the way we physically see the world. Whether it is adding up the number of people in front of us in a supermarket line or checking the numbers on a receipt, many of the day-to-day math applications and concepts we deal with revolve around vision.Or do they? A new project carried out by Johns Hopkins University neuroscientists suggests that vision is not as tightly wrapped up with math as we might think.As part of the study, researchers demonstrated the brain network responsible for numerical reasoning is identical in both…... [Read more]

One of the more interesting goals in neuroscience is to reconstruct perceived images by analyzing brain scans. The idea is to work out what people are looking at by monitoring the activity in their visual cortex.The difficulty, of course, is finding ways to efficiently process the data from functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scans. The task is to map the activity in three-dimensional voxels inside the brain to two-dimensional pixels in an image. That turns out to be hard. fMRI scans are famously noisy, and the activity in one voxel is well known to be influenced by activity in other…... [Read more]